Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621-1713

1 Interimperial Foundations: Early Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Caribbean and New Amsterdam

1 / Interimperial Foundations: Early Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Caribbean and New Amsterdam On the evening of September 29, 1632,1 the governor of the small and struggling English colony of Nevis welcomed a guest to dinner. Since the colony was blessed by abundant supplies of wood and water as well as a “fine sandy bay” that made it easy for “boats to land,” Governor Thomas Littleton was accustomed to receiving visitors from a variety of European empires. Their ships not only brought news, diplomatic intelligence, and fellowship, but also trade goods invaluable to the four-year-old colony that constantly feared the return of ravaging Spanish invaders. That evening his guest was David Pietersz. de Vries, a thirty-nine-year-old Dutch captain and trader who was on his way to the small settlement of New Netherland on the North (or Hudson) River but had stopped first in the Caribbean to load salt at the Dutch island of St. Martin. During De Vries’s two-day stay, Littleton prevailed upon the Dutchman “to take aboard some captive Portuguese” whom he wanted delivered to the English Captain John Stone at De Vries’s next stop, the English colony of St. Christopher.2 Upon arriving there, De Vries again met with the island’s governor, Sir Thomas Warner, and delivered the prisoners—most likely enslaved Africans taken from a Portuguese vessel—to Stone. De Vries and Stone evidently had much to discuss for when the Dutch captain weighed anchor and sailed for Dutch St. Martin on September 2, Stone was on board, leaving his “barge . . . to follow him with some goods” later.3 While such friendly contact and economic exchange between a Dutch merchant and an English governor may at first seem surprising—one 18 / beginnings, 1620–1659 might expect men acting as agents of competing empires to have had a strained, if not hostile, relationship—their affiliation was far from aberrant . Collaboration between governors, captains, and merchants from a variety of European empires was a regular feature of Atlantic settlement in the seventeenth century. These relationships, based not upon imperial policies and designs for empire, but on shifting personal and familial relations of convenience and benefit, characterized a seventeenth-century Atlantic in which imperial borders were permeable. Though in the vanguards of rival empires, colonists from England and the Dutch Republic found that, in the Americas, success depended on cross-national cooperation . As De Vries discovered in 1632 and on two subsequent voyages, English settlers were particularly welcoming to Dutch merchants who brought goods and services to sustain their colonies in the 1620s and 1630s. Simultaneously, Dutch colonists living in New Netherland, De Vries’s destination in 1632, found trade to neighboring English settlements to be a vital component of their colonial success. On the whole, the experiences of English and Dutch peoples in the Caribbean and North America during this early period of colonization taught colonists that survival and success at the periphery required them to rely not on a distant, and often aloof or distracted metropole, but on their own ingenuity in securing trade. These ideas of fluidity and openness created a lasting legacy that complicated the later imposition of rigorous imperial order on British colonial trade. Explaining the warm reception De Vries received from English governors and merchants requires us first to understand how and why the Dutch trader came to be in the Caribbean. By retracing his circuitous route, we gain a sense of the larger patterns of colonial settlement and economic development that shaped the seventeenth-century Atlantic, as well as the trajectories of Atlantic empire building. Ultimately, these forces created the conditions of opportunity and demand that bound together fledging English colonists and Dutch traders. Four months earlier, in May 1632, De Vries had begun the journey that took him to the Caribbean, guiding his vessel and its seven crew members away from the small island of Texel, the southwesternmost of the five Wadden Islands, which guard the entrance to the Dutch Republic’s great internal sea, the Zuiderzee. Passing through the English Channel into the open waters of the Atlantic, De Vries plotted a complex course determined by the prevailing winds and currents, taking the vessel to the Caribbean before eventually arriving at New Netherland. As he examined his charts and pondered the journey ahead, perhaps De Vries thought of interimperial foundations / 19 the thriving metropolis fast becoming the trading center...